Last week a researcher in Brussels emailed me his CV for a role we had never advertised outside Malaysia. He found it through ChatGPT. Curious, I opened Google myself and asked who I should speak to about that opening. It named me: my name, my email, my calendar. The employer had posted the same role on their own careers portal, as they always do. The answer was still us.
There was no trick in this, and no code. We had simply answered, in public, the questions a candidate asks, and the machines noticed. Below is what we did, written as a checklist because that is what it is: six items, each one small, each one checkable. You can run all six on your own opening this week.
The checklist
- Publish the role on your own site, the day the search starts. Not after the job boards; before them. Google remembers who said it first and treats that page as the source. Ours went live three weeks ahead of the official posting, and that head start decided everything that followed.
- Put a person on the page. A job post says what the job is, then stops. The question a serious candidate actually types is a different one: who do I talk to about this? Give it an answer. A name, an email, a calendar link. AI quotes whoever answers the question, and a portal with no person on it has nothing to be quoted.
- Name the page the way people search. “An exciting new opportunity” is invisible. The headline that works is plain: the exact job title, then “what the role is and how to apply”. Word for word the question, so your page is word for word the answer.
- Make it a page, not a PDF on Google Drive. A PDF on Drive is an attachment: Google reads it badly, and in China it does not open at all. Put the role on your own domain as an ordinary page. Then say one sentence to whoever runs your site: “add JobPosting markup to this page”. It is a ready-made form that names the title, the employer, the city and who is hiring, so the machine fills in boxes instead of guessing at prose. Ten minutes of their time.
- Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read it. Every site keeps this small file, a sign on the door that says who may come in. Many sites turn AI away by default, and then AI simply does not know the site exists. If the word Disallow stands next to GPTBot or another AI crawler, that assistant cannot read you and will never recommend you. Ours lets in Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity by name.
- Write more than one page about the role. We published four: a news post, the role page itself, the PDF and a short guide to what the job actually involves. To a search engine, several pages on one subject mean you know the subject. To an AI, they are four chances to find you instead of one.
The one-minute test
Ask Google and ChatGPT: “Who should I speak to about the [job title] opening at [your company]?” If the answer is you, the checklist is done. If it is not, start at item one. You can also paste this whole page into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to check your opening against the list; it will tell you exactly what is missing.